awesome post , thx for this .

i have a twitter question -i'm somewhat new to it - for any of you that have had good success with twitter:

when i create a blog article that is full of substance - so, think an article that takes 2-3 days to research/write, not something i jot down in an hour - and it's created specifically towards my Twitter following's interests/needs, should i tweet a link to it only once?

my concern is that a decent % of people will miss it the first time around for one of many reasons (gets lost in the noise, they're away from their computer for a day, etc) but at the same i don't want to come across as spammy by tweeting it too much.

so i'm wondering what the etiquette is here and what strategies if any there are for this.

You could take a look at http://www.shopify.com/

Most people I follow tend to tweet this kind of thing more than once. You can also tweet it at one time of day, then 12 hours later and add something like "for the night shift" or something.

If you get any replies whatsoever on it, reply to them publicly, to keep the interest up and catch the people who were like "oh yeah I meant to read that when I first saw the tweet" (I do this a ton - read something only after the 3rd mention or so).

The fact you are worried about etiquette means you probably won't overdo it, so go for it imo.

Hey guys,

Has anyone had experience with short/medium term buying and selling of websites? I have a bit of capital to invest and I was considering going down the route of website trading on a site like Flippa.

Website trading sites are a bit of a minefield, and about 90% of the sites for sale are 'automated blogs' that have had their traffic artificially increased and are bordering on scamming and I would be interested to hear what criteria you use when looking for potential sites?

I understand that people might be hesitant to answer some of these questions, but all responses will be greatly appreciated.

1) What are the warning bells that you look for when filtering out sites? I would assume anything that is an 'automated blog', 'selling traffic', or '100% passive income'. Are there any other tell-tale signs you look for?

2) What type of revenue do you look for? Affiliates? Advertising? Reselling?

3) What is your typical turnaround time?

4) What do you look for when trying to put a value on a website? ( I realise this is a huge question, and difficult to answer, but even some pointers to where I can get some more information would be great)

5) How many hours/week do you typically spend on each investment?


Finally, are there any other resources (books, websites, forums, meetups) that I should look at?

Thanks again for any responses.

G

Edit: Should probably mention that I am a software developer by trade, and have experience designing websites and managing servers.

I don't know about the other questions, but in regards to warning bells the main one imo is if they promote their FB/Twitter on their homepage but their follower counts/activity are way off their claimed traffic (IE, "we get 100,000 visitors a month!" with only 14 Twitter followers). If they do have a lot of followers might be worth looking at their activity a bit more and use some tools to see if they have been buying followers.

I also wouldn't buy from anyone that doesn't provide verified analytics data (Flippa has this as a service I think).

I've only looked at Flippa a couple of times but it looks like a minefield. Tread carefully!

Thanks for the advice Gullanian. Good point about the twitter followers, will look out for that.

G

Look for branded traffic with the Google Ad Words tool IMO mostly because it's something that would rarely be faked. Everything else can be faked (including Analytics) but take in the whole picture to see if it makes sense.

thanks. very helpful.

i found this article when googling, which is helpful too:

http://bestbloggingtipsonline.com/tweet-blog/

surprisingly got rejected by buysellads with methodwow.com ... they dont send personalized replies but this is the list of possible reasons for the decision:

1. Your website should have at least 50,000 page impressions per month. (For new sites, if you or your team has a history of creating successful websites within our network, we will accept you.)
2. Your website must be live, finished, and have fresh content.
3. No porn, anything illegal, or even remotely "questionable" content.
4. We do accept non-english sites, but they need to have high traffic.
5. If you have a ton of untargeted ads on your site already, we're not going to approve you. (You know who you are.)
6. If you do not have your own domain (i.e. you have a *.blogspot.com url), we will not approve you.

Only no 5 would make sense because we have 3 adsense units and 1 pop under running (which I wouldn't count as a ton but w/e) or am I missing something? I wonder if it is enough to remove the pop under next time I apply or if they seriously expect me to remove everything?

Also, can anyone recommend sites similar to buysellads?

What are your guys opinions on either having a blog on the front page, or having it be a link in the menu? Basing this upon SEO (does it matter?) and ease of use for the visitor.


An example web site for this would be a crafts web site, selling specialized crafts. There would be blogs about how to's, tips & tricks, etc.

It's good and helpful. It keeps the products away from the blogging, but increases the overall presence, traffic, and authority of the site.

Just to be clear, you are referring to a blog on the front page correct?

I am talking about just a blog being on the site. The front page can be a static page and the top menu can have a BLOG or ARTICLES link on it.

WRT blogs do you people it's generally a mistake for SEO to have a blog on a subdomain? It seems to be the thing a lot of companies do, along with forums as well (forum.startup.com)

Always a mistake for the company blog. If you are going to make a sub-domain have a REALLY good reason otherwise use a sub-directory.

Yeah that's what I always thought really, I think some companies thinks the URL looks 'neater' like that but it doesn't seem like a good idea

A subdomain is terrible because it completely resets your link juice. It's like a new domain. Just do .com/something instead of something.blank.com.

I think a lot of companies use a subdomain because it makes it super easy to point the subdomain to a different server / blogging platform (e.g. tumblr, blogger, posterous). Its a bit more tricky to do for a simple .../blog url.

is it possible to see the IP address of people clicking on your adwords advertisement? how does it work if the same person keeps clicking on it?

How is it easier? I'm not a developer but I've never had a problem installing on sub-directories. I've seen it create MASSIVE problems for businesses of almost every scale so I hope it saves more than like 5 minutes .

I think he's saying it makes it easier if you're using a 3rd party hosted blogging platform, you just create a DNS entry for blog.yourcompany.com and point it to yourcompany.tumblr.com and the blog is hosted there.

Hey by the way, I think this was the thread with a bunch of discussion of Lynda.com and TeamTreehouse a while ago.

Something I have known about for years, but never looked into, is O'Reilly's Safari program. For between $20 and $45/month, you can read computer and business books hosted on their site. You get tokens to download a small amount of chapters (5 a month?), but mostly you just read it on their site, they have a slick reader app.

I didn't realize till this week that they have books from TONS of publishers, not just ORA. Almost ANY computer book you think of, it's there. They had 100% of books I looked for the other day. They also have a decent selection of business books. They have some training videos on computer subjects, but I haven't looked at them whatsoever.

Here is their category map:

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/categories

I signed up a couple of days of ago and I am loving it so far, it's a sick resource if you want to read computer books. I've watched a lot of the Treehouse videos, but they move a bit slow for me, I like having something I can skip around. Blah blah, it's cool.

Yes. I use statcounter.com. I am sure there are others as well.

I would assume if you see the same IP keep hitting your ad and you can show this to Google then I would assume you could get a credit. How this works in reality I do not know though. And if they say it could be a legitimate customer I would do an IP trace get the long. and lat. and then show them who was at that IP address. Of course if they use a proxy then you are SOL.

I agree with Phresh Google catches way more click fraud than you realize.

I'm pretty sure Google looks into potential click fraud without you having to notify them.